Picture a classic film noir anti-hero just released from prison: he persuades his former associate to help him track down and murder the guy who ratted him out, then, fearing his associate will squeal, frames him for a different crime to get him out of the way. It’s a fairly standard noir plot line, but in Los Olvidados (US: The Young and the Damned), writer and director Luis Buñuel inserts this story in a destitute Mexico City neighborhood among a gang of juvenile criminals desperate for food and affection. Roberto Cobo plays the juvenile ex-convict El Jaibo, and Alfonso Mejia plays his fatherless friend Pedro, whose promiscuous mother ignores him unless he’s bringing home money or food; in fact, the only character showing Pedro trust or caring is the principal of the “farm school” where he’s later incarcerated. Panned by critics at the time of its release, the film is clearly influenced by Italian neorealism but incorporates Buñuel’s surrealist tendencies and a prominent theme of avian abuse: chickens are beaten and killed, a chicken egg is smashed against the camera lens, a live pigeon is rubbed against a sick woman’s body for healing. Famed Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa turns the neighborhood’s abject poverty into a gritty, cluttered landscape that transforms at night when noir lighting softens the vacated back streets. The film’s cynicism undoubtedly left Mexican audiences feeling cold in 1950; these kids are cruel (beating up a blind beggar, stealing a legless man’s wagon), and the bleakness of the final scene offers not one ounce of redemption.